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Carol II of Romania
Sinaia, Romania | died = Estoril, Portugal | buried = Royal Pantheon, Portugal (1953) Curtea de Argeș Cathedral, Romania (2003) | religion = Romanian Orthodox }} Carol II (15 October 1893 4 April 1953) reigned as King of Romania from 8 June 1930 until 6 September 1940. He was the first of the Hohenzollern kings of Romania to be born in the country (both of his predecessors were born and grew up in Germany and only came to Romania as adults). Carol, by contrast, spoke Romanian as his first language and was the first member of the Romanian royal family to be raised in the Orthodox faith. He possessed a hedonistic personality that contributed to the controversies and misrule that marred his reign. In 1940, he was forced to abdicate and withdraw into foreign exile. Early life with his nephew the future King Ferdinand and grand-nephew Prince Carol.]] Carol was born in Peleș Castle. Carol grew up under the thumb of his dominating great-uncle King Carol I, who largely excluded his parents, the German-born Crown Prince Ferdinand and the British-born Crown Princess Princess Marie from any role in bringing him up. Romania in the early 20th century had a famously relaxed "Latin" sexual morality, and in this environment, Princess Marie pursued a series of love affairs with various, predominantly Romanian men who offered her more emotional and sexual satisfaction than her husband Ferdinand could. For his part, Ferdinand fiercely resented being cuckolded. The stern Carol I felt that Marie was unqualified to raise Prince Carol because of her love affairs, whereas Marie regarded the king as a cold, overbearing tyrant who would crush the life out of her son. The childless Carol I (who had always wanted a son) treated Prince Carol as his surrogate son and thoroughly spoiled him by indulging his every whim. Ferdinand was a rather shy and weak man who was easily overshadowed by the charismatic Marie, who would become a much-loved member of the Romanian royal family. Growing up, Carol felt ashamed of his father, whom both his great-uncle and mother pushed around. Carol's childhood was spent caught up in an emotional tug-of-war between Carol I and Marie, who had very different ideas about how to raise him. The Romanian historian Marie Bucur has described the battle between Carol I and Princess Marie as one between traditional 19th-century Prussian conservatism, as personified by Carol I, and the 20th-century liberal values of a modernist and sexually-liberated "New Woman," as personified by Princess Marie. Aspects of both Marie's and Carol I's personalities were present in Carol II. Largely as a result of the battle between the king and Marie, Carol ended being both spoiled and deprived of love. From Carol I, he certainly acquired a "profound love of German militarism" (in the words of the American historian Margaret Sankey) and the idea that all democratic governments were weak governments, but he was also influenced by the intense Francophilia that prevailed in Romania of his day. Romania in the early 20th century was perhaps the most Francophile nation in the entire world; the Romanian elite obsessively embraced all things French as the model for perfection in everything. ]] During his teenage years, Carol acquired the "playboy" image that was to become his defining persona for the rest of his life. Carol I expressed some concern at the direction that Prince Carol's personal development was taking. His only serious interest was stamp collecting, and the young prince spent an inordinate amount of time drinking, partying, and chasing after women; he fathered at least two illegitimate children by the teenage schoolgirl Maria Martini by the time he was 19. Carol rapidly become a favorite of gossip columnists around the world owing to the frequent photographs that appeared in newspapers showing him at various parties holding a drink in one hand and a woman in the other. In order to teach the prince the value of the Prussian virtues, the king had him commissioned as an officer into a Prussian guards regiment in 1913. His time with the 1st Prussian Guards regiment did not achieve the desired results, and Carol remained the "playboy prince". In November 1914, Carol joined the Romanian Senate in accordance with the provisions of the 1866 Constitution of Romania, which guaranteed him a seat in the Senate upon reaching maturity. Reign to 1938 Returning to the country on 7 June 1930, in a coup d'état engineered by National Peasant Prime Minister Iuliu Maniu, Carol reneged on his renunciation and replaced his son Michael as king the following day. For the next decade, he sought to influence the course of Romanian political life, first through manipulation of the rival Peasant and Liberal parties and anti-Semitic factions, and subsequently by choosing a ministry of his own in January 1938. To compensate for his rather negative and well-deserved "playboy king" image, Carol created a lavish personality cult around himself that grew more extreme as his reign went on, which portrayed the king as a Christ-like being "chosen" by God to create a "new Romania". In the 1934 book The Three Kings by Cezar Petrescu, which was intended for a less educated audience, Carol was constantly described as being almost god-like, the "father of the villagers and workers of the land" and the "king of culture" who was the greatest of all the Hohenzollern kings, and whose return from exile from France via airplane in June 1930 was a "descent from the heavens". Petrescu depicted Carol's return as the beginning of his God-appointed task of becoming "the maker of eternal Romania", the start of a glorious golden age. A colorful character, his persona has been described by the Romanian historian Maria Bucur in these terms: "Of course, he loved luxury; being born to privilege he expected nothing less than the grand lifestyle he saw in the other courts of Europe. Yet his style was not outlandish or grotesque like Nicole Ceaușescu's unique brand of kitsch. He liked things large but relatively simple-his royal palace testifies to that trait. Carol’s true passions were Lupescu, hunting and cars and he spared no expense on them. Carol liked to present an impressive and populist persona to the public, wearing garish military uniforms adorned with medals, and to be the benefactor of every philanthropic endeavor in the land. He loved parades and grandiose festivals and watched them closely, but he was not taken in by these events as more than shows of his power; he did not take them as a show of sincere popularity as Ceaușescu did during his later years. Carol had a populist style, depicting himself as the defender of the common man against the corrupt Francophile elites (especially the National Liberals) who was also an exponent of nationalism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Carol's tendency to throw together populism, authoritarianism, nationalism and Orthodoxy superficially resembled the style of the right-wing Iron Guard movement, even though Carol's message was far less extreme than that of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the leader of the Iron Guard, who preached a message of ferociously xenophobic ultra-nationalism, intense Orthodox mysticism, violent anti-Semitism, a populist disdain for all the elites in Romanian society and a glorification of death in the service of the cause as the most noble experience in the entire world. Codreanu, a man with a death fetish, had made the Iron Guard into a macabre death cult and often sent his followers out on what were clearly suicidal missions. After committing murders, Iron Guardsmen rarely attempted to flee and instead waited to be arrested as they wanted to be executed for their crimes. Many found the way that Legionaries went to their executions positively joyful about the prospect of their own deaths, happily proclaiming their deaths were the happiest moment of their life. Carol regarded Codreanu's death fetish, together with his claim that the Archangel Michael had told him that God had chosen him to save Romania, as evidence that he was "crazy". In his coronation oath, Carol swore to uphold the Romanian constitution of 1923, a promise he had no intention of keeping. From the start of his reign, he meddled in politics to increase his own power. Carol was an opportunist with no real principles or values other then the belief he was the right man to rule Romania and that what his kingdom needed was a modernizing dictatorship. Carol ruled via an informal body known as the camarilla, which was made up of courtiers together with senior diplomats, army officers, politicians and industrialists who were all in some way dependent upon royal favor to advance their careers. The most important member of the camarilla was Carol's mistress Magda Lupescu, whose political advice Carol greatly valued. The "Red Queen," as Lupescu was known to the Romanian people on the account of the color of her hair, was the most hated woman in 1930s Romania, a woman whom ordinary Romanians saw in the words of the British historian Rebecca Haynes as "the embodiment of evil". Carol's ex-wife Princess Helen was widely viewed as a wronged woman, while Lupescu was seen as the femme fatale who had stolen Carol away from the loving arms of Helen. Lupescu had been brought up as a Roman Catholic, but because her father was a Jew, she was widely viewed as Jewish. Lupescu’s personality antagonized many Romanians, as she was arrogant, manipulative and extremely greedy with an insatiable taste for buying the most expensive French clothing, cosmetics and jewellery. At a time when many Romanians were suffering from the economic effects of the Great Depression, Carol’s habit of indulging Lupescu’s expensive tastes caused much resentment. Further adding to Lupescu’s immense unpopularity was her habit of exploiting her connections to the Crown to engage in dubious financial transactions that usually involved the transfer of large sums of public money into her own pocket. The contemporary view that Carol was a mere puppet of Lupescu is incorrect, however, and Lupescu's influence on political decision-making was much exaggerated at the time. Lupescu was primarily interested in enriching herself to support her extravagant lifestyle and had no real interest in politics beyond protecting her ability to engage in corruption. Unlike Carol, Lupescu took no interest in social policy or foreign affairs and was such a self-absorbed narcissist that she was unaware of just how unpopular she was with ordinary people. Carol, by contrast, was keenly interested in affairs of the state, and though he never sought to deny his relationship with Lupescu, he was careful not to display her too much in public, as he knew that this would risk making him unpopular. Carol sought to play off the three major political forces in his country against each other (the National Liberals, the National Peasant Party and the Iron Guard) with the ultimate aim of making himself master of Romanian politics and disposing of all the political parties in Romania. Carol had no intention of permitting the Iron Guard ever to come to power, but insofar as it was a disruptive force that weakened both the National Liberals and the National Peasants, Carol welcomed its rise in the early 1930s and sought to use it for his own ends. On 30 December 1933, the Iron Guard assassinated the National Liberal Prime Minister Ion G. Duca, which led to the first of several bans placed on its political activities. The assassination of Duca, Romania's first political murder since 1862, shocked Carol, who saw the willingness of Codreanu to order the assassination of a prime minister as a sign that he was getting out of control and that he would not play the role Carol hoped for as a disruptive force threatening the National Liberals and National Peasant alike. In 1934, when Codreanu was brought to trial for ordering Duca's assassination, he used as his defense his belief that the entire Francophile elite in Romania was completely corrupt, and Duca, as a member of it, was just another corrupt National Liberal politician who deserved to die. The jury acquitted Codreanu, an act that worried Carol as it showed that Codreanu's revolutionary message was winning popular approval. In the spring of 1934, after Codreanu was acquitted, Carol, together with the Bucharest police prefect Gavrilă Marinescu and Magda Lupescu, was involved in a half-hearted plot to kill Codreanu by poisoning his coffee. The effort was abandoned before being attempted. Until 1935, Carol was a leading contributor to the "Friends of the Legion," a group that collected contributions to the Iron Guard. Carol only stopped contributing after Codreanu started calling Lupescu a "Jewish whore" (see below). In 1935, he set up a paramilitary youth organization known as Straja Țării to help counter the influence of the Iron Guard. Carol often encouraged splits in the political parties to encourage his own ends. In 1935, Alexandru Vaida-Voevod, the leader of the Transylvanian branch of the National Peasants, broke away to form the Romanian Front with Carol's encouragement. During the same time, Carol developed close contacts with Armand Călinescu, an ambitious National Peasant leader who founded a faction opposed to the leadership of Carol's archenemy Iuliu Maniu and wanted the National Peasants to work with the Crown. In the same way, Carol encouraged the "Young Liberal" faction headed by Gheorghe Tătărescu as a way of weakening the power of the Brătianu family who dominated the National Liberals. Pointedly, Carol was willing to allow the "Young Liberal" faction under Tătărescu to come to power, but excluded the main National Liberal faction under the leadership of Dinu Brătianu from obtaining power; Carol had not forgotten how the Brătianus had excluded him from the succession in the 1920s. In February 1935, Codreanu, who until then had regarded as an ally of Carol, for the first time attacked the king directly. At this time, he organized demonstrations outside of the royal palace attacking Carol after the Romanian scientist Dimitrie Gerota had been imprisoned for writing an article exposing the corrupt business dealings of Lupescu. Codreanu in his speech before the Royal Palace called Lupescu a "Jewish whore" who was robbing Romania blind. This led an insulted Carol to call on one of the members of his camarilla, the Bucharest police prefect Gavrilă Marinescu, who sent the police out to break up the Iron Guard rally with much violence. Carol had little understanding or interest in economics, but his most influential economic advisor was Mihail Manoilescu, who favored an etatist model of economic development with the state intervening in the economy to encourage growth. To his credit, Carol was very active in the cultural realm, a generous patron of the arts who actively supported the work of the Royal Foundation, an organisation given a broad mandate to promote and study Romanian culture in all fields. In particular, Carol supported the work of the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti of the Social Service of the Royal Foundation, who in the early 1930s started to bring social scientists from disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, ethnography, geography, musicology, medicine and biology to work together in a "science of the nation." Gusti took teams of professors from the various disciplines to the countryside to study an entire community from all vantage points every summer, after which they would produce a lengthy report about the community. Category:Kingdom of Romania